> Those features aren't a good faith attempt to comply with the law
There can be no good attempt to comply with this (completely terrible) law from Uber, since this law was meant to outlaw the whole business model Uber is using. Uber was founded on creating a novel working model, which didn't exist before. California decided to outlaw this model wholesale. The only "good faith attempt" from Uber to deal with it can be to stop operating in California completely. Of course the same goes for Lyft and any other company which uses "freelance employee" model.
Actually, it's very simple: treat them as employees, including granting required benefits and paying them at least minimum wage for time worked (presumably at the higher of either minimum wage or per-trip earnings for the time period).
Nothing about this is incompatible with allowing employees to pick their own working hours.
Also restaurants refuse to deliver to poor neighborhoods after their delivery person gets robbed there once or twice. I've seen this problem in New York.
The employee debate has near uniformly turned into dialing back rider protections, removing up front costs and handing drivers more control. The employee requirements will unquestionably increase ride costs and decrease driver availability. This is going to worsen access to poor neighborhoods and add costs on people who cannot afford to pay them, making ride share further restricted to "good" neighborhoods and higher income folks.
Well no, it's just the opposite. When everyone is a "contractor" you can get a ride in a poor neighborhood, you just have to pay the market rate for getting a ride there.
When you try to legislate it, then you get avoidance. The driver gets assigned and then suddenly has "car trouble" or becomes ill. You summon a ride but it doesn't show up for 45 minutes because all of the drivers avoid being anywhere near that area if it means they could be forced to go there.
Whereas if you just pay the market rate then a driver shows up right away because they're getting paid extra to do it. And if you don't like that rides cost more in poor neighborhoods then the government could subsidize it explicitly, instead of creating all of these perverse incentives by trying to force people to do something they otherwise wouldn't be willing to do for that amount of money.
Which also puts a dollar value on the subsidy and makes it explicit, so that we can see how much we're paying in order to get it, instead of sweeping it under the rug by making the cost implicit even though it's still there.
> And if you don't like that rides cost more in poor neighborhoods then the government could subsidize it explicitly
OK, how does that work? How do you write such a law such that it can't be exploited? Are there any examples of this kind of regulation you can point to from other markets or other legal regimes or nations or whatever?
I mean, this seems crazy to me, but it's also an opportunity to get you to engage on a genuine issue of social justice (c.f. "it shouldn't cost money to be poor"), so I'm willing to make the effort.
Calculating the amount is finicky because the subsidy itself is going to affect the market pricing. But in the end, as long as there is a competitive market for both drivers and ride share companies, you know whether the subsidy is too high or too low because the subsidized cost of a ride there will be more or less than it is in other places (rather than exactly the same as you're trying to make it).
Because if the subsidy was too high then there would be "too many" drivers and the subsidized price would fall below what's required, and if the subsidy was too low then the opposite.
That often even stays the case when the mail service gets privatized.
I’ve never heard of such services to originally be privatized, though, or of the service to be privatized to multiple providers (say with one company serving the large cities and another the countryside, or one doing half the country, and another doing the other half)
Also: are you sure this is libertarianism? I would think subsidies can’t exist in a libertarian world because the government doesn’t exist there.
This is a relatively new model, although makes a lot of sense (lower cost and more flexibility to operate uber pools vs empty buses late at night). It is not a stretch to assume you could get income based "discount cards" for uber usage.
But part of the social contract is that employees, having given up that autonomy, need someone else to advocate for them collectively. Thus... labor rights and benefits legislation.
Frankly this whole thing seems silly. They knew where this was going when AB5 was passed. Those features aren't a good faith attempt to comply with the law, they were an attempt to evade it (something very much in keeping with Uber's culture).
The only real surprise here was that the final reckoning came sooner than expected via injunction.